Tuesday, April 24, 2018

I'm eyeing this Programming Praxis exercise as one to tackle next but there's a catch before I can start programming. TinyScheme, my current Scheme Interpreter of choice, doesn't have support for generating random numbers, and the exercise requires this.

I could hack something together using TinyScheme (and probably the Programming Praxis Standard Prelude). Or, I could do as John Cowen suggested, and try out a different implementation. He suggested Chibi-Scheme. Chibi Scheme is lightweight, but unlike TinyScheme, it's also quite modern. This means, among other things, it should give me easy access to the SRFI-27: Sources of Random Bits library. Longer term, it would be ideal to have access to R7RS features and other modern niceties.

I busted out my cell phone and hardware keyboard. I opened up Termux and went to work. Here's my attempt at getting chibi-scheme running on Android:

Thanks for sharing -- chibi-scheme seems like a hit but I do appreciate the other options.

GNUroot is amazing, but I found that Termux was just a tad bit more useful for me. The biggest issue I had with GNUroot was an android quirk: the only way I could get back to a GNUroot instance was through the notification menu. I couldn't link a keystroke to it. That always irked me.

Termux also has some interesting paid addons, which are a fun way to support the author. You can add commands to your home screen, for example.

Regardless, it's amazing the options you have for running bash and related tools on Android.